By Troy McAlpin, CEO & Co-Founder, Atono

I sold my company in 2021. $240M acquisition. Over a decade of building xMatters from a $6,000 idea into something that served 2.5 million users. The kind of exit that's supposed to feel like the finish line.

For about six months, it did. Then the feeling faded.

I started volunteering at our local homeless shelter. No CAC. No LTV. No board deck. Just real people with real problems, and me showing up trying to be useful.

Startups compress your world into metrics and deadlines. The shelter reminded me how small that world actually is.

It was the best year I didn't know I needed. And oddly enough, that realization ended up shaping how I think about AI and startup teams today.

But it also forced a question I'd been avoiding: what had I actually missed along the way? The honest answer wasn't a product decision or a hiring mistake. It was smaller moments. Dinners I showed up late to. Birthdays I was mentally somewhere else for. The slow background hum of building something that gradually became the loudest thing in the room.

I'm not writing this as a confession. I'm writing it because I'm building again — with Tobias Dunn-Krahn and Doug Peete at Atono — and doing a few things differently. The things I changed matter more than anything I could tell you about product strategy.

What I Actually Wish Someone Had Told Me

Companies are temporary. Family is permanent.

I know that sounds obvious. You've heard it. You probably believe it. And you will still violate it consistently for the next five years if you're not deliberate.

Here's what it looked like in practice at xMatters, and still does: I never miss a birthday. Not my wife's, not a child's. Not for a board call, not for a close, not for a product crisis that feels like it can't wait 24 hours. It almost always can. And on the rare occasion it genuinely can't — the team handles it without me. Turns out, fine.

One thing that didn't change: I still work at 4 am. Not as a badge of honor. Because it means I'm present at 6 pm dinner. The hours exist either way. The question is which ones you give to the work, and which ones you protect for the people who will still be there after the exit.

Startup culture can reward visible intensity. Long weeks become currency. Skipping vacations becomes a signal of commitment. I bought into some of that for a long time. What I eventually learned is that sustained clarity beats sustained exhaustion. Every time.

The Work Advice Is Simpler Than You Think

The thing I got wrong early at xMatters was believing that urgency and effectiveness were the same thing.

They're not. Urgency is a feeling. Effectiveness is a result. Confusing them leads to very busy teams that aren't actually moving.

Here's what actually moved things:

We're all on the same team.

Sounds obvious. Rarely practiced. At xMatters, we called it SameTeam — the idea that every person's contribution matters equally, regardless of title, tenure, or function. Not as a value painted on a wall. As a daily decision about how you treat people's time and ideas. When it broke down, I felt it immediately in how people communicated. When it held, we got through things that should have broken us — 9/11 eighteen months in, the 2008 financial crisis, a complete business model transition in 2012. SameTeam wasn't culture decoration. It was load-bearing.

Best idea wins.

Rank is a terrible filter for good ideas. The best insight in any meeting might come from the newest person in the room — the one who hasn't learned yet why something "can't be done." We made it explicit: the best idea wins, and once we decide, everyone supports it. That second part matters as much as the first. Debate hard, then commit fully. Teams that relitigate every decision after the fact are exhausting to be on and slow to ship.

If you don't protect culture, it will erode.

Not dramatically. Quietly. One compromise at a time. A hire you knew wasn't quite right. A behavior you let slide because the person was performing well. Culture doesn't announce its own decline — you just wake up one day and the team feels different, and you can't point to the moment it changed. Guard it like it's the most important thing. In the long run, it is.

Those principles shaped everything at xMatters. They still do. But there's another shift founders are navigating right now that adds a new layer of complexity: AI.

The AI Piece (Because You're All Dealing With It)

A recent study from METR highlights something founders are starting to see firsthand. Experienced developers working on complex codebases — the kind every startup eventually has — are sometimes taking longer with AI tools than without them. Not because the tools are bad. Because the tools are blind to everything that makes your product yours.

What it does. What your team is actually building right now. Whether the way you're working is generating real velocity or just activity.

AI accelerates the individual. It doesn't touch any of that.

When teams adopt AI tools without improving their shared context, something strange happens: individuals move faster, but alignment gets worse. Engineers generate more code, PMs generate more specs, and the team spends more time reconciling the difference. You've automated the easy part and amplified the chaos.

This is part of why I'm building Atono. AI right now mostly rewards the individual — the faster coder, the more prolific PM, the designer who can spin up a prototype in an hour. We still believe the real power is in the team. Always has been. That's the same conviction behind SameTeam, and it's why Atono is built around accelerating how teams work together — preserving the context that keeps everyone aligned —not just the individuals within them. But whether you use our product or not, the lesson matters: context decays faster than you think, and rebuilding it is expensive.

The Honest Version

The founders who last aren't always the ones who moved fastest. They're the ones who stayed present, built teams that didn't depend entirely on them, and treated the company as something they were building — not something they were being consumed by.

The exit validated a lot of things. But the year at the shelter clarified something the exit didn't: the work matters because of what it enables, not the other way around.

Startups are marathons disguised as sprints. Pace matters.

Go build something great. Be home for dinner.

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